Nick Kemper’s Blog

When I first started at TPN, I was supposed to work alongside the person originally hired to do what I do now but he decided that there were other opportunities out there for him, so we only worked together for less than a month. Phones […]

One of my favorite co-workers announced today that he is leaving us. I don’t think his future is set — it sounded like he wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. He wasn’t insulted (I don’t think) when I asked if he is […]

“Sales” is a bad word. The thing is, we’re all in sales — a great deal of the time, whether or not we like to admit it. And most of the time we’re not getting paid for it. A lot of people think that sales […]

On my way home from work last week I dropped off some items at our corporate office in lower SE Portland, and then took the old 99E through town to get onto I-84. I passed some kind of soup kitchen/homeless shelter and there was a […]

The Winter Olympics are here. I don’t know why I love the Olympics so much. I don’t know why I’m compelled to watch Women’s Curling DVR’d at 2 a.m. (is this the beginning of the End, or the end of the End?). This is the […]

My two older children are battling a bad cold this week. My son, who is 16, rarely gets sick, which is ironic because we almost lost him to autoimmune hemolytic anemia when he was four months old. I don’t remember ever seeing him as sick […]

Employee theft is one of the most disturbing challenges business owners face. Usually, what bothers company owners most is the betrayal and disloyalty, rather than the actual monetary loss. You might get stolen money paid back, but getting back trust is a much tougher process. […]

I think I mentioned in a previous blog that I am on the board of the youth baseball association my son plays in. We had an awful year as a league last year, due to infighting on the board and poor choices for some of […]

The numbers aren’t all in yet, but it looks like 2013 will end up being the best year so far, financially speaking, for TowPartsNow. No one is retiring early and there won’t be any executive vacations from the windfall, but it’s progress, and we’re happy […]

Some of you have been enduring extreme weather conditions this winter. I live in the temperate Northwest, where it is rare to have extremes of any kind except for extremely good microbrews and not-too-shabby coffee. We had a week or so of lows in the […]